Not exactly sure what you mean by the above but below is a possible answer:< http://distrowatch.com/ > Page Hit Ranking provides some pretty compelling evidence of Ubuntu wisdom.

Cheersrob

Posted by noordinaryspider on July 13 2005,16:01

Quote (andrewphoto @ July 12 2005,19:00)

Anybody got any opinions of wisdom on Ubuntu?

Not exactly wisdom, just one n00b's experience.

Resident Distro Slut here.

I've still got Kubuntu (KDE version of Ubuntu) on my 400 Mhz PII. I'm having problems with networking and AV codecs. I've given up on doing any audio editing with that distro.

My DSL machine gets used instead of my KDE machines about 90% of the time so maybe I'm just being lazy about learning Kubuntu. What I'd recommend instead for a quick-and-easy down-and-dirty switch for a less-than-technically-interested windoze user is Simply Mepis, which popped on the small (soon to be replaced) HD of my lappy very quickly for checking out the hardware, transferring files to my flash drive, etc. All I needed that wasn't already on the CD was the codecs for playing commercial DVDs.

I also run Slackware on a P4 that has a sound card that does not support DSL.

What I need KDE to do could probably be done just as easily with more myDSLs, a larger partition, and a bit more time put into my own education as well as customizing my installs on a 56K connection, which is rather time consuming.

Just my $.02 USD. I've been using DSL longer and more intensively than anything else so of course I'm most comfortable on it, although I am aware of its limitations as a newbie distro.

This is not a paid promotion.

Posted by gbuscrizist on July 19 2005,05:23

kubuntu isnt as userfriendly as ubuntu, ubuntu was my first distro ever, it is really simple to use, i would say it is like windows, it is very easy to navigate and it helps with a lot of stuff.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on July 19 2005,12:25

Kubuntu is an official Ubuntu release.

The only difference is that it has KDE.

Everything else is the same.

It's VERY user friendly.

Posted by aveline on July 20 2005,02:40

i am typing this from ubuntu & quite enjoy it tho i admit it has its issues...mostly with sound & some (i've read) issues w/multimedia. its easy for beginners, better than dsl in this respect imo, and quite honestly its alot snappier than i thought it would be on this old laptop.

sorry dsl but your user friendliness just isn't there quite yet or i'd have given it to my g/f to use. oh well ... hopefully in a few more releases it will be good nuff she'll be able to use it as well as shes got on w/ubuntu.

aveline

Posted by MethodOne on July 20 2005,02:57

I just got my Ubuntu CDs from their shipit page. They came in a white envelope with a return address from The Netherlands. I'll install it once I get my new laptop.

By the way, which codec for commercial DVDs is legal in the US?

Posted by nickelplated on July 20 2005,12:15

Legal? There isn't any. Your government cares more about corporations than people, so they enacted something called the DMCA that effectively makes you a criminal if you play your DVDs on a Linux box. They'll change their mind in a few more years as we gain critical mass.

The package you'll need is libdvdcss2.

Posted by noordinaryspider on July 20 2005,12:26

Unfortunately, I live in the abovementioned unfortunate banana republic. Corporations are considered "people" and the laws intended to protect the rights of individuals have been warped and twisted to protect the corporations.

I can't even begin to describe what the brain laundries have done to the humanity of individuals, other than to say that the phrase "American human" is an oxymoron; I can't advocate bigotry based on a person's nationality, but I can say that if you have limited time and energy, you might want to adjust your first impressions and decisions on who is worth interacting with accordingly.

Getting stabbed in the back for no reason by someone you have invested a lot of energy in isn't fun.

Anywho, all I had to do to play DVDs in Simply Mepis was open command prompt, type in "apt-get --libdvdcss2" and there it was.

That was literally all I had to do other than a basic install, but I'll check out the suggestions for my Kubuntu box. I'm still glad I bumbled across DSL as a rank, raw newbie, even though I have quite a bit to learn and some hardware to buy before I can give up newbie distros altogether.

I can't even remember the last time I had to boot into windows for anything, though; waste of hard drive space for my lappy, even though I've got a perfectly legal copy of '98. I never did do anything with the XP partition on my Slack box, either.

We get there, us newbies, but I guess we all take slightly different paths.

Posted by ivrobi on July 21 2005,06:28

@aveline:Well, you can't compare a 50MB distro with a full CD version... Naturally, you can be more "user friendly" if you don't have to squeeze your OS to fit on a business card CD.

Posted by mgmont on July 21 2005,13:30

Yesterday I down loaded the live cd version of Kubuntu. I tried it on a couple of different computers. I had trouble finding a video driver that would work on one of the computers (Dell gx150). The video driver was not on the list, but I did finnally find a driver that would sort of work. The other machine was a laptop with wireless. The video was OK, but I had some problems with setting up the wireless to work. However I did get it working after trying for a while.

Kubuntu seems similar to my SuSe distro. I suppose that is because they both use the KDE desktop. I guess I am spoiled, but it was much slower than DSL for the things that I normally do. It does have a lot of features and software built in. I think with a little more work it will be a good free alternative to some of the distros that cost money.

For now I will stick to DSL and keep SuSe for the more complex things since it is already paid for.

Posted by ShaneRay on July 21 2005,13:44

I've been using Ubuntu for the last few weeks. I must say that I like it quite a bit. I haven't had very many problems at all. Any problems I did have were very simple to correct.

All in all, I'd say this a great distro. Very easy to use for sure. This is the first distro I've used (other than DSL) that felt good the moment I booted into it (if that makes sense).

I'll be using Ubuntu on my main system for a while along with DSL and DSL on the laptop it saved from death.

Posted by doobit on July 28 2005,14:34

I've been using Ubuntu for AMD64 on a laptop for a couple of weeks, and it's as good a 64 bit Debian-based distro as there is out there right now. I tried the 64 bit Mandriva distro as well, and I like Ubuntu better at this point because of the auto update features. I love DSL because it is really, really fast and light enough to use on some old computers I've been playing with. For almost everything I need in computing I've been able to get some Linux distro to do the work, including professional level video editing. There are still some weaknesses, like WiFi, but even that is coming along.

Posted by Domhnull on Aug. 12 2005,13:33

I've used Ubuntu since the first preview release of Warty. For me Ubuntu was the distro that finally convinced me to eliminate Windows. On my desktop system it runs very well. I have my music, World of WarCraft, all the apps I could possibly want, etc. I've had less issues with it than I did under Windows.

On my old laptop, however, Ubuntu doesn't work. I tried it. It installed. But with 40mb RAM on an old laptop it wasn't useable. DSL has worked very well on the laptop (new frugal install). After using DSL on the laptop I've also started to experiment with Fluxbox on my Ubuntu machine.

Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on Aug. 19 2005,10:58

I just tried the liveCD of 5.04, and I must say that I was disappointed. After taking probably three times as long as DSL to start (on a 2GHz machine), there didn't seem all that much of interest on there, nothing more than I fit on a 185MB myDSL disk, and my wireless network wasn't recognised. But the real perplexing thing was that it didn't give me access to my harddrives! There was absolutely nothing under /mnt, and I couldn't see any mounting system anywhere. And this is with plain old FAT32!

When I get a new hardrive (hopefully shortly), though, I do intend trying out a full install. I haven't had a full install of a "proper" linux desktop in years, so I intend really exploring just how close I can get to living an MS-free existence... will need to see if some things run under WINE though, as there are a few definite things, like FlashMX2004, that I need, which don't have native replacements or ports.